When you begin to understand the potential for the Internet of Things (IoT), you view the world a little differently. You find applications that could be drastically improved. One area that I’m shocked that hasn’t caught up yet is the elevator.

If you live or work in building, the process in getting to your floor hasn’t changed much since the introduction of the elevator. While the technology around creating safer elevators has drastically improved.

Honestly, it sounds needlessly complex. Today, I walk into a lobby on the ground floor in a building that only has floors above. Replacing that button with a single low-fidelity camera could decrease that time by adding a simple command, “when person is within 10 feet and facing forward, make one elevator come to the ground floor.”

An even smarter application might be able to recognize a visually impaired person with a white cane, a person with crutches, a walker or a wheelchair and enhance that rider’s experience by allowing for a few extra seconds to exit the elevator.

As a former Bostonian, I grew up with the ideas of “four corners,” where the first four people to enter an elevator find a respective corner and “own it.” Yet, elevator buttons are in one of those corners. A smart elevator might simply ask passengers, “Floor, please?” With passengers entering from other floors, it would simply ask again. A panel might show which floors have already been selected. Sounds like Star Trek right? It is. And Star Trek first aired in 1964. This smart elevator isn’t a new concept.

Smart Elevators might also want to employ well-used and off-the-shelf camera technology to serve a variety of needs. For instance, facial recognition software might unlock floors that require certain approval instead of the leaning through an elevator crowd to swipe an access code. Such an application could also help those facing medical emergencies since there are far too many conditions where a person is unable to hit the Help or Alert button. A Smart Elevator might have an application where it sees a person on the floor of the elevator, connects that person with a 911 service as well as property staff to not only get help but bring that person to a floor where they could receive more immediate attention. With situations such as heart attacks, seconds are crucial and smarter elevators really could save lives.

Smart elevators could also be used for safety as well. During fire drills, when people are asked to take the stairs, elevators could be programmed to quickly return to their base floor for safety. And while it would take some approval, a smart elevator might remember floors where passengers with mobility issues are located and remain open for those people to get them to safety if they can’t use the stairs.

Such features should not require new elevators since the cost would far too prohibited. Upgrading existing elevators would still incur some expense but the benefits would help increase efficiency, safety and convenience.

Finally, smart elevators could easily end “elevator music” with something as simple as nature sounds, daily building activity updates, breaking news or a variety of different versions of radio-friendly music.

He, looking down at his iPhone 5S, had a point. More often then not he’s not using it to call anyone. He plays games, texts, surfs the web and plays music. Not typical functions of a standard telephony device but a modern, very nimble communications device that merges together many functions in a small and powerful device.

Which got me to thinking, if our smartphones aren’t really phones any longer, what should we really call them? And from a marketing perspective, how would you reclassify billions of devices with a completely new term based on the functions we use “smartphones” for every day?

Oddly, as an old school tech guy, my first “smartphone”-like devices were Personal Digital Assistants, devices that replaced notepads, to do lists and some gaming functions. PDAs replaced paper.

Yet, the iPhone was the first successful mainstream volley into something different and a stroke of marketing genius. Combine the popular iPod music player with a multipurpose communication device tied to a massive distribution backbone and see what happens. It worked amazingly well. The smartphone replaced more than paper or PDAs, it replaced many different devices and tools.

We use our smartphones less and less for voice communications as VOIP services take over. So much so that even cell phone companies are having difficulty in keeping up with product demand for GBs per month and how to charge for text messages (which should be free).

Rebranding them isn’t easy. It needs to be short, Tweetable, SMS-able and simple. My suggestion would use a term we use every day and grow it. It needs to be all encompassing and roll up all the many things that we do on our devices. At the end of the day, we no longer just use our smartphones to talk, we use them to communicate in a variety of ways.

My suggestion is simple. We should call our smartphones a better,, more appropriate name. After a few weeks of marketing ideas and a list of long possibilities, my suggestion would be to rebrand a “smartphone” as a “Comm.”

A Comm is one less letter than phone and six less than smartphone (alas, tweetable). And given that most of the commercial websites that we focus on every day use .com, a variation wouldn’t be hard to market. Yet, Comms aren’t just for commerce, they would stand for Community, a way to use apps and networks to create communities of individuals that create new ways to interact and communicate. And it can be Common, a way to think less about walled-in networks and build smarter, more adaptable communities through a list of common APIs, platforms and applications.

Our smartphones really aren’t phones anymore, they’re Comms, devices that allow people to communicate in traditional, novel and new ways. And while paper, emails and text messages continue, Comms remove the analog behaviors of the past and finally embrace a fully digital today. Replaced by hard drives, cloud, interconnectivity and evolving ways to communicate.

Consumer laptop technology is the fine art of balancing the needs of a market with the trends they perceive as desirable. Companies put a massive amount of money into researching those trends in the hopes of finding the Holy Grail feature that will get a consumer to buy their laptop.

I’m a consumer who prefers laptops with more CPU and GPU power along with the longest amount of battery life. Yet, while companies have made great strides in creating laptops that have computing power, battery life is still a major limiting factor. That’s where the balancing happens. Want more power? Then the GPU and CPU will be mobile chips. As those mobile chips push the laws of physics with their computing power to energy sipping ratios, they’re great for basic functions and apps but not for professional level programs and intensive video games.

And I applaud Razer’s upcoming Razer Blade ultra laptop that will offer the Razer Core accessory that delivers that option when gamers return home through the power of Thunderbolt. Yet, it can’t deliver everything while on the road.

The newer MacBooks seem to show that Apple is listening to consumers. Apple shrank the logic board in its laptops and filled the remaining space with custom batteries that will let it run for up to 9 hours. While I haven’t tested one yet, that’s impressive. It shows a clear engineering decision to deliver more energy in a smaller package.

Yet, why not have a different option? While laptops get thinner and thinner, why not give people an option to order an ultrathin laptop with a 24 or 48-hour battery? Same specs but no longer ultrathin, a thin laptop that would give those who go on long flights without power cords or those who roam to places without power a different option. Or having such a modular design would allow those who want an ultrathin most of the time the option to swap out the battery base with a longer lasting one when needed.

Power users would likely pay a premium for such an option but for the throngs of people fighting over the only power socket in an airport terminal, why not give power users thin laptops with massive amounts of battery life and the CPU speed they need?

So while I watched The Verge’s CES 2016 coverage on the latest in ultrathin laptops, I’m not looking for something thinner, I’m looking for something that’s less about a cord and more about the freedom from them. Time to get laptop makers to notice that need.